The objective of this proposal is to support participation of young investigators at the XVIIth Testis Workshop on Functional Genomics of Male Reproduction. This will be held March 26-29, 2003 at the Sheraton Crescent Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, directly preceding the American Society for Andrology (ASA) annual meeting. Young investigators are defined primarily as those within five years of receipt of the Ph.D. degree (principally postdoctoral and medical residency trainees), but graduate students will also be considered for awards. The Testis Workshop is an investigator-initiated meeting, originally established in 1972. The Workshop has a tradition of recruiting top experts from both within and outside the area of male reproduction to give state-of-the-art presentations to both inform and cross-fertilize our scientific interactions. The format is geared to providing new knowledge in a series of talks with extensive discussion as well as in two poster sessions. Awardees will be presenting research data in the poster session. The theme for the 2003 Testis Workshop will be "functional genomics of male reproduction." This theme is based on the emerging understanding that the rich approaches of functional genomics will bring new understanding to mechanisms underlying testis development and function, enhance our unfolding knowledge of male reproductive function and ultimately translate to clinical diagnostics and approaches. The program will highlight the value of strategies that discover gene function in developmental and physiological processes relevant to the testis, the germ cell and male reproduction in general. It is the aim of the organizers that the young investigators participating in the conference will be stimulated intellectually and encouraged to pursue their careers at the forefront of research in this area so important to human reproductive health.